I am a current Sonic customer in Southern California, with a DSL service that I use as a back-up. I'm moving to San Francisco, and intend to order single line Sonic Fusion for my new home.

A few pre-purchase questions:

(1) Will my current DSL modem be adequate for Sonic Fusion? I bought it from Sonic; it's a Motorola Netopia 2210-02.

(If not, I could order a new modem when I order Sonic Fusion).

(2) I'm moving into a house with phone jacks in several different rooms. I want to insure that Sonic Fusion will work from the phone jack in the room I'll use as an office. When I called Sonic about this a week ago, I was told that you only guarantee Fusion service from one jack.

I'm also having an electrician upgrade circuitry on the new home, and he said he can upgrade my telephone wiring, too. He told me that my new jacks will not be daisy chained, but will be home run wiring from the demarcation point at the front of the house. He seemed to think that I should get Fusion service from any jack, for that reason ... but I thought I'd check with you, to see if you agree.

(3) As long as I've got an electrician out there and am upgrading wiring: are there any other improvements I might make from the demarcation point that could enhance Fusion service?

For #2, you can only plug the DSL modem into one jack. However, if you have multiple jacks, then you can plug in multiple phones, as long as you have multiple filters. I agree that a star topology is best; that way, if one wire gets cut or damaged, it can be disconnected at the demarc (aka, MPOE in other threads) and not affect the rest of the house.

In #3, ensure the electrician uses twisted pair wiring, at least CAT 3. Do not use the old quad wiring--that is sufficient for voice lines, but when carrying data, it isn't good at blocking interference, particularly in today's environments, with lots of power cords and transformer bricks.

If you know for sure which room(s) will have the DSL modem plugged in, consider having a whole-house filter/splitter installed at the demarc. The lines to all other rooms can run off the "phone" side of the filter/splitter, and two pairs (within the same cable) can run to the room with the DSL modem, one from each side of the filter/splitter. This would avoid the need for a filter at each telephone that's plugged in.

Virtualmike covered all the points pretty well on the phone wiring. New internal wiring is definitely a boon with any DSL service and having the electrician do it while he's already in the walls makes a lot of sense. Depending on your needs and budget, you might consider setting up wired Ethernet too.

Thanks very much for the responses, Virtualmike and Juliana. I'll share this information with the electrician!

One follow-up: will CAT3 be sufficient, or should I go for CAT4? I'll be fewer than 5,000 feet from the CO, and expect (or hope!) to realize the high end of what Fusion can offer, in terms of speed. Wikipedia says that Cat3 is good for about 10Mbit/s.

If you're running Ethernet, I would try to get something rated for at least 100 Mbps and probably 1 Gbps -- you might as well make it as future-proof as possible. CAT5 at a minimum and potentially CAT6.

As far as phone cables go, from what I understand, CAT5 doesn't tend to be substantially more expensive than CAT3. It also allows you to run up to 4 phone lines with a single cable. While that's more than a typical household will need, it does allow you to try swapping pairs if one goes bad without running a new line.

two Cat 5e cables to each wall plate would be nice (including the locations for the televisions), or even three if you have excess cable (I guess its the same labor), you can install the additional wall jacks when needed

make provision for an Ethernet switch (eg. $40 8 port gigabit switch) at the place where all the Cat 5e come together to redistribute Ethernet around the house (have the electrician put a couple of power outlets here) .. Wi-Fi is convenient but often cannot give full speed/reliability vs. real copper pairs